Matt Patricia Happy Team Took Bye Week to Focus on Getting Better
The lack of a preseason may not have been more detrimental to a team more than the Detroit Lions.
With several young pieces added to the roster and a returning quarterback who had missed nearly a year of football, the preseason could have provided Detroit an opportunity to work out any potential issues prior to the start of the season.
The team then proceeded to started the season 1-3, and no particular unit played exceptionally well.
Playing the Jacksonville Jaguars after a bye week is a nice elixir to cure the ills of a struggling football team.
Head coach Matt Patricia was asked during his video conference Monday how the team could build upon their second victory of the season.
"I think you try to stay consistent, you stay even all the way through. Certainly you want to take what we're able to do yesterday and build on that. I think that's good for everybody just to have a little bit of confidence in some of the things that we were doing and to be able to see it," Patricia said. "And honestly see what I would call two weeks of work really show up in a game."
"The bye weeks are never easy. We thought it was a really good time for us to grind it out and really take a look at the first four games. We really didn't have much of an opportunity to do that with the preseason. So we needed to do it. I thought the guys took two weeks -- which is always hard to do, and focused on 'how do we get better?' That was really good to see. Hopefully we carry that over and try to string another good week working behind it," Patricia commented further.
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Assessment of decision to simplify things across the board
Last week, Detroit's third-year head coach explained that he wanted his team to play faster and that he felt simplifying certain aspects could aid his team accomplish their goals.
What was Patricia's assessment of how things worked out?
"I thought really from the start with our kickoff coverage unit, I thought that was really good on those plays that we were able to cover and kind of pin them (Jaguars) deep inside the twenty -- some of that stuff was simplified a little bit. I thought those guys played really fast and aggressive. We had a big win to start the game. I thought we had another big one in the fourth quarter, too, which kind of put their offense on a long field. So that was really good to see from that standpoint."
Patricia explained further, "I thought some of the things that we were trying to do -- both in the run game offensively and the run defense -- simplify it a little bit and maybe some of it was just coaching points and kind of maybe some of the different fits in some of the different blocking that we're doing up front that I thought kind of freed those guys up to play a little bit more aggressive."
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